Tibetans

Buddhism came to Tibet in the imperial period, under kings who saw in it both truth and statecraft: Songtsen Gampo took Buddhist queens from Nepal and China in the seventh century, and Trisong Detsen invited the Indian master Shantarakshita and the tantric adept Padmasambhava to found the first monastery at Samye around 779. Tradition holds that Padmasambhava bound the local gods and demons of the plateau to protect the new teaching, a story that captures the actual settlement: the mountain gods, spirits of place and household rites of older Tibetan religion were not abolished but enlisted.

Bon, Tibet's other organized religion, understands itself as the older faith, brought from the western land of Zhangzhung; in its surviving form, documented in Per Kvaerne's study of its iconography, it closely parallels Buddhist monasticism, scripture and art while keeping its own founders and lineages. Scholars debate how much of it preserves pre-Buddhist religion and how much grew alongside its rival.

Tibetan Buddhism proper organized into four great schools, Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug, transmitting tantric practice through empowerment and oral instruction from master to disciple. Its distinctive institutions include the tulku system of recognized rebirths, of which the Dalai Lama, held to embody the compassion of Avalokiteshvara, is the most famous; the beloved poet-saint Milarepa, whose songs carry Kagyu teaching; devotion to the savior goddess Tara; and the funerary literature of the bardo, the between-state, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The Tibetan empire of the seventh to ninth centuries contested Central Asia with Tang China, then fragmented, and Buddhism, briefly persecuted, returned in a second diffusion through translators such as Rinchen Zangpo and the master Atisha. Mongol patronage raised the Sakya school to rule; the fifth Dalai Lama, with Mongol backing, unified Tibet in 1642 under the Ganden Phodrang government, and the Potala Palace rose over Lhasa as its seat. For three centuries a monastic state administered the plateau, its great Gelug monasteries around Lhasa numbering thousands of monks, while pilgrims circled Mount Kailash, sacred at once to Buddhists, Bonpos, Hindus and Jains.

The People's Republic of China annexed Tibet in 1950 and 1951; the Lhasa uprising of March 1959 failed, and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India with tens of thousands of followers. The Cultural Revolution destroyed most of Tibet's monasteries; partial rebuilding since the 1980s has restored much physical fabric under close state control, including state regulation of the recognition of reincarnate lamas.

In exile, Dharamsala became the seat of the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, and the great monasteries were refounded in south India. Tibetan Buddhism has since become a world religion, its teachers established on every continent, even as scholars such as Donald Lopez caution against the Western habit of turning Tibet into a fantasy of Shangri-La rather than a living people.